The best way to help people lose weight and keep it off is to develop programmes based on solid evidence of what works and what doesn’t work. At the moment, we don’t know enough about how to do this. NoHoW will tackle this problem.

About NoHoW

research in weight loss maintenance

Weight loss maintenance is difficult. We will learn how to help people do it.

Health problems associated with obesity are a major healthcare challenge. Effective interventions and successful commercial weight loss programmes to help people lose weight already exist. However, most people re-gain the weight they lose – weight loss maintenance is really difficult.

Researchers already know that weight loss maintenance (WLM) depends on changing behaviours. There are many techniques available to help people change their behaviour in the long term but we still don’t know which of these techniques work best for WLM or why. We also don’t know how different social and healthcare contexts influence the effectiveness of different techniques. To better tackle obesity and being overweight, we need to learn more about how different people change their behavior to maintain their weight loss - this is the main research aim of NoHoW.

During the project, we’ll also use what we learn about behavior changes to develop tools to help people maintain their weight loss, and look at how technology can be put to work to help people make lasting changes. We’ll then assemble a Toolkit for WLM - the NoHoW Toolkit - that we’ll test with the help of participants in the United Kingdom, Portugal, and Denmark.

Weight Loss Maintenance (WLM)

Which techniques work best for WLM? The NoHoW team is working on strategies and predictors for WLM.

Changing behaviour

We need to learn more about how different people change their behavior to maintain their weight loss. At the moment, we don’t know enough about how people maintain their weight loss, or why they regain weight, to develop really effective programmes for weight loss maintenance (WLM).

NoHoW Toolkit for Weight Loss Maintenance

The Toolkit will include a set of mobile apps, web-based tools and inputs from other technologies, such as smart scales and activity trackers. We’ll also learn what our potential users would like to see included and how they would like to interact with the Toolkit.

Once we’ve put the NoHoW Toolkit together, we’ll test it to see how it works through a research study carried out in the United Kingdom, Portugal and Denmark.

Meet the team

The NoHoW team is composed of behavioural scientists, psychologists, weight loss maintenance experts, tracking technology and ICT experts, intervention trialists and biostatisticians from across Europe, supported by an experienced project management team. The team also has the dissemination and communication networks to ensure that the project delivers the intended impact, in both commercial and academic spheres.

Related Projects

We are lucky to work in an exciting new domain where other projects are designing and developing many awesome lifestyle interventions. Just take a look.

SWEET

Long term benefits and potential risks of sweeteners & sweetness enhancers

SWEET, a European Commission Horizon 2020 funded project, is supported by a consortium of 29 pan-European research, consumer and industry partners, who will develop and review evidence on long term benefits and potential risks involved in switching over to sweeteners and sweetness enhancers (S&SEs) in the context of public health and safety, obesity, and sustainability.

PROTEIN

Providing personalised nutrition and physical activity support to EU citizens

PROTEIN is a research initiative led by a consortium of European public- and private-sector organizations working to promote health and wellbeing. By bringing together experts from across Europe, PROTEIN will develop tools using the latest communications technologies and machine learning strategies to provide personalized nutrition and physical activity support to EU citizens.

EuroFIT

Social innovation to improve physical activity and sedentary behaviour through elite European football

EuroFIT aims to harness the ‘love of the game’ to engage football fans in health-promoting lifestyle changes through their loyalty and attachment to their clubs. The project will develop an evidence-based intervention to enable men to make sustainable improvements in their diet, activity, and physical fitness, and assess the intervention through am international randomized controlled trial. NoHoW partners Universidade Lisboa and Pintail Limited are also partners in EuroFIT.

SPOTLIGHT

Sustainable prevention of obesity through integrated strategies

SPOTLIGHT will systematically define the factors necessary for establishing effective health promotion approaches, taking into account individual, family, organisational, and environments that can change behaviour, lifestyles, and life skills to sustainably reduce obesogenic behaviours in an innovative way. NoHoW partners Universidade Lisboa and EASO are also partners in SPOTLIGHT.

NULevel

NULevel project

NULevel is a research project into weight loss maintenance run by NoHoW partner Newcastle University. NULevel has created a new, scientific programme to help people avoid weight regain that is being tested with people who live or work in the North East of England.

MoodFood

An EU-funded project looking at how food intake, nutrient status, food‐related behaviour and obesity are linked to the development of depression.

MoodFOOD is an EU-funded project looking at how food intake, nutrient status, food‐related behaviour and obesity are linked to the development of depression. The project is combining existing high quality data from longitudinal prospective European cohort studies with new data from surveys, short-term experiments and a long-term preventative intervention study. NoHoW partners Aarhus University and EUROPEAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF OBESITY (UK) are partners in MoodFOOD

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 643309. The material presented and views expressed here are the responsibility of the author(s) only. The EU Commission takes no responsibility for any use made of the information set out.